Société des écrivains des Nations Unies à Genève United Nations Society of Writers, Geneva Sociedad de Escritores de las Naciones Unidas
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- Petia Vangelova, UNHCR Silent Night, Holy Night
- Jo Ann Hansen Rasch, UNSW/SENU
- Francesco Pisano, UNOSAT
- David Walters, UNOG, retired
- Nadejda Khamrakulova , UNECE
DIE PAPA « Savez-vous combien… l’Italienne… avant de… » La voix de l’intervenant était serrée et métallique. J’essayais de me concentrer. Quelqu’un hasarda une réponse. L’homme au complet gris hocha la tête puis sourit. Ses yeux bleus se transformèrent en fentes. Qu’y avait-il d’aussi drôle ? La question ? La réponse ? Ou bien le fait que personne n’arrivât à la trouver ? L’exercice se poursuivit… Les séminaires peuvent aussi être utiles : on peut échanger des idées, des informations, des savoirs. On apprend des choses. Mais cette chose-là, je refusais de l’apprendre. Car je n’arrivais jamais à oublier un événement marquant… Je suis encore au Zaïre, non loin du croisement d’un méridien et d’un parallèle un peu au-dessous de l’équateur. Il fait chaud. Le soleil est très haut dans le ciel. Une forêt immense s’étend tout autour. Baobab géant. Palmiers énormes. Hauts bambous. Broussailles épaisses. Les serpents. Les noirs sont les plus nombreux. Longs ou courts. Gros ou minces. Certains roulés en boule, d’autres étirés. Dans les arbres et les buissons. Ils attendent le couchant orange. Dès que le cercle de feu aura achevé de parcourir la voûte céleste, ils élanceront leur corps souple vers leur proie. Ils devront attendre longtemps. Il est encore midi. On étouffe. Trente-huit, quarante, quarante-deux, quarante-six degrés. Celsius. Le chemin de terre rougeâtre fume en faisant des ronds de poussière. Je peux même retrouver le camp de réfugiés les yeux bandés : mon habituelle visite hebdomadaire. Je saute de la jeep ; le chauffeur en a pris l’habitude. Je vais marcher un peu – une vingtaine de minutes – en passant devant les chaumières alignées à droite du chemin, brunies et chargées d’un pressentiment de ruine. J’avais entrepris d’escalader le terrain escarpé lorsqu’un cri strident m’arrêta. Le second cri me tordit les boyaux. Je regardai le chemin en contrebas. Le cri venait de là-bas : du chemin, boa rougeâtre. Un garçon mince en guenilles, d’à peu près dix ou douze ans, courait vers moi à toute allure. Son t-shirt déteint, criblé de trous, était trop ample pour lui, au point de ressembler à une robe. Il couvrait son pantalon court, si tant est qu’il en ait eu un. Son col, profondément échancré, dévoilait une poitrine maigre aux côtes saillantes. J’essayai de discerner ses mots. Peine perdue. Je courus à sa rencontre. Que se passe-t-il ? demandai-je en français. Il continuait à pleurer. Des larmes aussi grosses que des haricots roulaient sur son visage. Très beau, d’ailleurs. Front haut. Long nez droit. Joues légèrement rentrées. Peau admirablement satinée, chocolat foncé. Grands yeux marron pleins de terreur. Que se passe-t-il ? demandai-je en portugais. Je m’en voulais d’avoir reporté le moment de prendre des cours de kikongo et de lingala - les dialectes parlés au Zaïre. Même un vocabulaire de base m’aurait aidée. « Di papa deu mea », proféra la gorge étranglée par les hoquets. Nom d’une pipe ! Que pouvait bien signifier cela ? Je ne comprenais rien. Je réitérai ma question. L’enfant me répondait inlassablement. Il dit pour la troisième fois ce qu’il avait à dire. Ah ! papa ! Quelque chose était arrivé à son père. Qu’est-il arrivé à ton papa ? Dis-moi tout. Il désigna son pied d’un geste fébrile, et ses pleurs devinrent hystériques. Qu’est-il arrivé à ton père ? Dis-moi. Il me montrait son pied nu, toujours plus nerveux. Son index pointait le gros orteil. Après avoir posé ma question et obtenu la même réponse pour la cinquième fois, j’étais convaincue que son père avait été mordu par un serpent. Pourquoi était-il sorti en pleine canicule de midi ? Le puits se trouvait au fond du pré, en bas du camp de réfugiés. Il avait dû tomber sur un serpent sorti promener son corps gluant et rechercher un endroit frais à une heure inhabituelle. Je me rendis compte que le garçon était un réfugié : il réagissait beaucoup plus aux questions que je posais en portugais. De plus, entre les chaumières et le camp, il n’y avait que l’infirmerie que nous avions construite. Le prochain village était à vingt kilomètres. Écoute, où est ton père ? Il y a une infirmière de garde dans le camp. Il y a aussi une infirmerie. Allons la trouver. J’ai également une pierre noire. Ses yeux étant pleins d’incompréhension, je me mis à fouiller dans mon sac. La pierre noire miraculeuse ! On fait une entaille sur l’endroit mordu par la « chose » horrible et on place la pierre dessus. Sa surface lisse devient mate en absorbant le sang et, par-là, le venin. L’effet est garanti. Et la mienne n’est pas fausse. Le corps frêle se crispa davantage. Je le pris par la main et l’entraînai vers l’infirmerie. L’infirmière, ou plutôt l’infirmier, jeune homme qui n’avait que la peau sur les os comme tous les êtres alentour, répondit à mon salut et me demanda comment j’allais. Sa blouse était blanche comme de la neige. Quel était le secret qui rendait cette blancheur possible dans un tel endroit perdu au milieu de nulle part ? S’il vous plaît, demandez au garçon où est son père ; comme il pleure toujours, je suppose que l’incident a eu lieu il y a quelques minutes. Tous deux entamèrent une brève conversation en lingala. L’infirmier semblait perplexe, mais au bout d’un instant, son visage reprit son expression de masque serein. Qu’est-ce que c’est ? Dites-moi ! Je n’en sais rien, madame. Comment ça ? Vous parlez bien sa langue – je vous ai entendu. Alors, où est son père ? Il haussa les épaules. J’essayai de me calmer et de baisser le ton. Ces gens trouvaient la mort tout à fait normale. Mon refus d’en faire autant était mon problème. Venez avec nous, on va retrouver le père. Madame, fit l’infirmier… (Je rougis chaque fois que j’y pense…) Le père du garçon n’a pas été mordu par un serpent. Alors pourquoi pleure-t-il… ainsi ?… (Je commence presque à bégayer.) L’infirmier se mit à cligner des yeux. Il a perdu… Je n’attendis pas la fin. Il avait perdu ses chaussures. J’étais bouche bée ; je ne savais plus à qui en vouloir : au garçon ou à moi-même. Okay. Dites-lui d’arrêter de sangloter. Combien coûtaient ses chaussures ? Trois cent francs congolais, me répondit-on. Je sortis trois billets. Voilà. Où peut-on les acheter ? Au marché d’aujourd’hui. Ah oui, c’est vrai, on est jeudi. Un camion traverserait la frontière et, pendant plusieurs heures, diverses marchandises seraient étalées. Le plus souvent, il s’agissait de troc. Le petit voulait apparemment s’y rendre. Je me demandais ce qu’il s’imaginait pouvoir troquer contre une paire de chaussures. Ou bien voulait-il tout simplement voir si l’on vendait encore des chaussures dans le monde. Je n’en avais pas encore fini avec les questions. Alors, c’était quoi comme chaussures ? L’infirmier traduisait. Il s’agissait de tongs en plastique. Comme au Japon. Des précisions suivirent. Roses, aux lanières noires. Il ne les avait cependant pas perdus : quelqu’un les lui avait volés pendant qu’il jouait au football. J’imaginai le ballon : des bouts de papier usagé d’origine non identifiée, le tout bien pressé et ficelé. La forme, presque parfaite. Mais, s’il vous plaît, dites-lui d’arrêter de pleurer. Papa signifie donc chaussures. Demandez-lui pourquoi, lorsque nous parlions, il me montrait toujours le gros orteil de son pied gauche. L’infirmier murmura que c’était très simple. Il s’agissait de la chaussure gauche. Comment ça ? Cette fois, l’infirmier faillit briser son masque, mais il se ressaisit et me répondit poliment : Madame, ce garçon n’a jamais eu deux chaussures. Il n’en avait qu’une ; c’est elle qui lui a été volée. Cela me mit en colère pour de bon. Contre moi-même, bien entendu, car j’avais réagi selon ma culture – linguistique, colonisatrice, que sais-je ? – ou selon mes propres appréhensions. Curieusement, tout le monde n’a pas la phobie des serpents ; mais tout le monde n’a pas deux chaussures non plus. J’aurais dû au moins écouter les gens qui me parlent… La voix métallique me fit tressauter, me ramenant parmi mes collègues dans la salle de séminaires. L’exposé sur l’économie de marché et la concurrence croissante dans le business humanitaire touchait à sa fin. La voix atteignit son point culminant. Toutes les suppositions émises par les participants s’étaient avérées fausses. La bonne réponse était : avant de s’acheter une paire de chaussures, l’Italienne moyenne en essaie une soixantaine. Petia Vangelova, UNHCR Silent Night, Holy Night “Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.” - Robert Browning She is happy. Unexpected really, she thinks as she arranges the hors d’oeuvres on a plate. It is Christmas Eve and she is preparing a family meal. Her husband and sons have taken grandparents and other family members to the traditional service at the local church, but she has chosen the kitchen. This evening, she has time to savor her home, the sweetness of her festive preparations, the crackling wood fire and a solemn chiming of church bells. She glances up and sees the blood red streaks of the dying day trail across the sky and linger on the snowy mountain summits. Her own silhouette, dark and still, reflects in the window. While she gazes, a violent longing to be more than a shadow in the vivid landscape grabs her physically. The pain of her desire tightens her muscles and with a clenched fist she squashes an innocent deviled egg. It has been over a year since she has seen him. She doesn’t need to look at the clock to know he will be out under the cold, clear sky, walking Turf, his retriever. “That’s when I allow myself to dream,” he’d told her. He is thinking of her; she can feel the thread of his mind winding into hers. She knows his big hands are cold and feels him blowing warmth into them. At first he had apologized for their roughness but she had only felt their tenderness. “Happy Christmas,” she murmurs as she turns away from the window. After supper, her family sprawls comfortably around the tree and watches the candles burn down. The bay windows reflect the quivering lights, giving an illusion of a myriad of flickering stars. “Silent night, holy night,” the song is sung by all of them while the candles splutter and die. That night she wakes from a nightmare and hears her husband talking in his sleep. She strains to understand but his muttering is like an animal’s dream where she has no place. She thinks of her own nightmare. She has dreamt that her mother-in-law and a taller, younger woman, both dressed in flowing black, are advancing in a threatening way towards her husband, their backs turned away from her. They want to take over his life and she cannot warn him though she tries desperately to move forward. Their evil menace is even more terrifying because she knows these creatures are part of her. In the early morning she decides to make love with her husband again. She has refused him for months. She has known so much pleasure with her lover, more, she thinks, than she will ever know with her husband… unless she teaches him what she has learnt. They stay in bed until noon. Their sons have left early to try out their new snowboards. Her husband gets up and brings her a cup of coffee and some toast. Then she snuggles back down under the covers. She hears him clearing off the supper table. He is stacking the dishwasher, scouring the pots and pans, giving their crystal wineglasses special attention. She even hears him whistling above the voracious sucking of their vacuum cleaner. She smiles. This happiness is an unexpected Christmas gift. Jo Ann Hansen Rasch, UNSW/SENU 
Dublin Graffiti Photo by Florence Chabannay An Ordinary Love Geneva, 12 September 1999, XXth Century My dear love(r?), I hope you are well and everything is fine on your side of the planet. I got your letter yesterday; I kept it until after I was able to take a bath and relax a bit. I read it on the new couch we saw at Interio. I thought I would just buy it in view of... the next time. Although you don’t say much about what you’re doing there, I gather from your letter that you’re having fun and getting some work done too. I am happy for you. I am happy that you are busy and enjoying life there, and I am happy that you can give it up to be together with me in this tiny corner of Switzerland. Here summer has given way to our favourite season. The air is crispy and yet not cold. The lake is blue and the cabrio is all set for our weekends in the South (I booked the place in Portofino for 22-23 Sept, so do not miss that flight!!). I am writing you this letter with something special in mind. I never do this, but I want/need to tell you about this dream I had last night. I just woke up and it is still all in my mind and since it felt as if I was living it for real, to a point that I have never experienced before, I feel compelled to fix it somewhere. You are the best somewhere I know. So it all began with ... you. I see you in my dream, but it is not really you. She looks and moves like you, and speaks to me like you; she has the same voice, the same accent. I saw her taking a shower and her body is like yours. Everything to the tiniest detail. Yet she is not you and I know this at first glance, but I know there is nothing I can do to change this. I know my reality is her and the real you is like an ideal person that I carry in my soul, whom I can describe, whom I know perfectly; but reality now and here in the dream is this other you. I live with her. In our attic. The only difference, the new couch is not in the dream. Not because I haven’t bought it yet, but because this is the future. I know as I dream that the dream is in the future. I know this well, and it is somewhat painful, like these dreams that you know are going to turn into a nightmare at some point if only you keep dreaming them. But I did nothing, I kept dreaming as if this was a movie that I didn’t really want to watch and yet I was unable to turn off. The dream begins in our kitchen while I am sitting opposite to her [I will call her “her” so you don’t get all mixed up in case you read this after one of your aperitifs with your mysterious friends... ]. We are having breakfast together; it is an ordinary day, a working day I think. Even though the dream begins at this point only, I can feel an amount of memories of our life together. We live together; we have decided to be together and here and now we are doing just that. We are eating breakfast and drinking coffee brewed with an Italian mocha. There are all sorts of fruits on the table, neatly cut, peeled and arranged on some sort of nice Japanese big plate. The plate is grey. As I write this, it is resting in front of me on the table. It was the same plate. Like you and me, we are talking of all sorts of things, but only since after our first cup of coffee, which we had in silence, listening to one of the classical CDs, looking at the mountains in the distance, savouring this harmony. I know in the dream that this is what we call it. Harmony is what we have when we are together. We appreciate it because we have been seeking it; we think we deserve it at this point of our individual existences. We are engaged in protecting it. Or so I feel while I am having the dream. We are talking about something. Her smile appears and disappears changing her expression continuously, like waves. It’s magical. I feel good. I feel like I want, and need, to feel. Perfect. Although we are talking about other things, I know in the dream that we made love this morning. We don’t particularly enjoy lovemaking so early in the day. But today we did. We do it when we feel like it. It is part of us but not the entire us. It feels good. When we do it we communicate; we tell each other things that don’t have words for them. I know we did it this morning, but we are now talking of something different. We smile a lot but we don’t laugh. I know we laugh a lot together, but mornings are more, like, smiling at each other, like a couple of explorers who made it to their greatest destination after fearing the worse, which is to never get there, or to get there too late to enjoy the event. It is right then that this thing comes to me. Or more precisely, it hits me in the chest. I realise that she is not you. I know this for sure, and it is a fact I try to digest and face as quickly as possible, while I carry on with the conversation. I am not panicked or anything, not like a horror scene when the character finds out something unexpected and scary. It is just like a fact, bizarre as it may feel (and it does feel bizarre). She is looking at me as she speaks and I am so in love with her eyes, really, they are the centre of her. They shine when she smiles at me. But that’s the thing, they shine twice. I don’t know how to explain this: her eyes shine twice at the same time, at two separate depths in her gaze. There are two hers? No, she is one. The thing that is wrong with it, I know, is that there’s another her, and that is you. [I hope you are not getting lost ... sorry, it is a dream after all]. As this fact dawns on me, I simply accept it. She is with me here and now, having breakfast. The bed is still warm and undone. I think that I will have to remember to make it because I know she won’t. And all the same, the other her (meaning you) is present in my mind, more like she is in my soul, she is my soul. But this other her (you, the real you) feels immaterial to me as I sit opposite to her. As I dream the dream on, I know I love you with all my heart and soul, but it is her with whom I live my actual life. I am with her but I do not have the impression that I am stuck with her. It is only that idealistically, she is not you. I also know that somehow I cannot get to you, call you on the phone, or something. You are this idea but more tangible, like I knew you before her. It is a strange feeling that, when she smiles to me over her third cup of coffee, I find myself missing you. I hear my pulse in my temples for a few seconds. Now (after waking up from the dream) I know it was fear. Pure, distilled, prescription strength fear. [I hope I am not bothering you! Maybe you can take a break. I just did. I went pee... And guess what? I found a pair of your underwear in the cabinet under the sink... How the hell did they end up there? It reminds me of when you take your late night showers that make me die with expectation and forethoughts... Better not to think of these things. Still ten days to go before you get back home. I hope you too call this home when you think about it – always damn scared about this thing]. After breakfast we both stand to clean up. It feels normal. I know we do this every day when we are together (when we are not, I pretend she is there and I say silly things as I clean up alone). I put the dishes in the machine. She disappears to put on another classical CD, and she comes back to the kitchen. But, now she’s stopped clearing up. With my back turned to her, I know she got back sitting at the table; and she is in fact when she says: - Do you want to go back to bed? I was not thinking of this. I thought she had to go somewhere this morning. I have two meetings coming up shortly. I mentally rearrange my schedule, invent instant excuses for the meetings, imagine her breasts in my hands when she is on top. I say: -You want to be on top of me? She says: -That too. I turn to her with that thing we both do, half smile and half biting the lower lip. She is doing the same thing. She is so sexy I forget we are humans living on planet in a system ruled by physics. I forget everything when I look at her because she is my heaven. And heaven is not of this world. Then this thing happens out of the blue; it happens just like that, carried by her words that, although made only of sound, become suddenly as real as stone. A boulder sitting right in the middle of our (formerly my) kitchen. She says -When we did it this morning, before, you remember? When you were about to come why didn’t you come inside? The question itself is anodyne, but it carries the full weight of another, underlying, question. The real question is lodged into this one like the fissile material is cased in its ballistic missile “vehicle”. I feel I want to make fun of it: Torpedo in the water!! Combat positions everyone, children and women below deck!! But the vehicle-question has hit another spot in me. One that makes me think I should not laugh of it. After the question is spoken, its sound lingers in the kitchen’s air like the noise of the arrow between the bow and its target. I become alert. I haven’t been this alert with her before. I am not prepared. I don’t want to. I don’t want the question to exist, because the other question it carries stealthily does not fit our life. So, all of a sudden, I find myself thinking why this question now, which means another question? Instead of thinking of an answer, or at least a reply. There is no answer; no logical and sincere answer. We are logical and sincere to one another. So I have to find a reply rather than an answer. This means I have to break our tacit pact of sincerity. A fissure forms on the polished surface of my love for her. The building is still magnificent, but the fissure shows more thanthe rest because I know it is there. I know it won’t go away even if we painted over it. As I think of all this, I am already a beat too late for a good reply, so that any reply will now sound made up, somewhat tactical. She is not tactical. We do not play these games because we are not simply partners, we are allies. I just don’t know what to say but don’t want to face it. I don’t want to give the wrong impression or send the wrong signal. I want to send no signal at all. I look at her; I see the fissure in the white stonewall. She doesn’t. She sees a space where my answer should have been. She gets into the space. She is now a woman reducing the distance between herself and her objective. Never mind that the objective may be a vacation, a fur coat, a concept, or a baby. Nothing can stop this now; nothing that would still keep us together and stop this. Basically I didn’t answer and maybe managed to look sincerely curious and not panicked like any ordinary man of my age. So she speaks the real question, which sounds less sneaky than the first. But it does not register in me. All I hear is my inner voice translating her question into another one directed by me to myself -Do you want to spend your life with her? Do you want to keep this love from harm because you believe this is no ordinary love? Just like that, this exact term: no ordinary love. I believe perfect things cannot be described in the positive, but rather by comparison with imperfect ones - Yes I do; Yes twice. I say: -Yes. I mean to speak to myself. She means I am speaking to her, to us, to the idea of us that she is now projecting into the future on a screen only she can see. The distance between her and the objective is zero. She is on the target. Her eyes shine but this time only one shine. The one deeper down in the brown of the eye. Not the way your eyes shine. The other way. This part of the dream went by really slow, not as in slow motion, but not normal speed either. Instead, after this “scene” the dream sped up. All the details of every day where there, but went by faster like the film had been fast-forwarded in my imagination. There were beautiful days, our usual trips, lots of laughter, lots of lovemaking. Changing lovemaking. But some of these changes were lusty, felt like the evolution of our bed habits, or couch habits, or habits anywhere else in the flat. We were so conscious of the freedom we shared that doing it elsewhere than in bed was nothing else but taking possession of the freedom contained in the volumes of all the rooms in the flat. It was there, it was ours, why limit ourselves to using only the freedom volume in the bedroom? She was the most amazing pregnant woman who ever existed. Her beauty multiplied. Her sexiness stayed unchanged. Some days it was even more intense. Her looks, skin, mood climbed to a peak so high I felt a form of dizziness guessing that from such heights we could only climb down. But this was not to happen for a while. So I did what men my age do: I postponed. I lived what was offered to me in exchange for a later invoice of unspecified amount. I lowered my gaze onto the day I was living and never looked up once. I saw her happy and that caused me to be happy for the longest uninterrupted time in my life. She got this enormous belly. But for me she was still one. She looked cute in this new outfit. Although terrified at the possibility that her perfect (and I mean perfect) skin could become damaged by this large stretch, I was taking photos of her on the scale or while changing as if this pregnancy were to remain memorable. And it was in way because that was the last time that she was one. And we were two. For all the time of the pregnancy I never thought of anything else but protecting her, making her every single day nice, secure, bacteriologically safe. I guess all fathers-to-be try to do the same with mixed results. I accomplished it to the limit of sheer perfection. Only I was not impersonating any father-to-be, I was just acting concretely the mission I had been given at birth: love and protect and create happiness for this one individual woman. So for all this time, in the dream, I did not have the feeling that she was not you. Nothing had changed, but I just did not think about it. There were too many things to do that we had never done before. We made plans to move, to change cars, to do or no longer do all sorts of things. These planning sessions always came at night, taking the place of our couch warm-up sessions. She would start them like she had found on the internet a template schedule of what to plan for the day the baby is born. There was a precision in the sequence that I thought was foreign to her. I always contributed gladly; I always did it with a smile of protective affection since my mission of making her happy would admit no exception. [Are you still reading all in one go? Because now it gets a little freaky, but it is the best part. Imagine that while I was dreaming what comes later, I woke up and even went to the bathroom, and then I got back to bed and the dream resumed exactly where I had left it. Like when I was a child – Yeah I know you can still do that, and then I have to listen to the whoooole story over breakfast.... OK, take a break now and have one of your hundreds of coffees, because you will need some stamina to read the rest.] The oneness of the two of us ended one day at the hospital and once again three days later when we got home in the new car. But no one noticed this end, not even us, because the baby was there and it was really a cute sight, and it was a beginning. Since you may not begin the same thing twice, it was clearly the beginning of something else. Here the dream accelerated again and then slowed down as if all the uninteresting parts of the new life played fast-forward. But some parts played and felt totally realistic. The crying at night, her fatigue, the breastfeeding. At one point in the dream I was having a dream [are you with me??] that her breasts were bloody and there was all this milk coming out and we did not know where to put it. When I woke up (from the dream in the dream, that is) I told her I had this strange dream, but as I was telling her the story the baby started to cry and she had to go, and then she forgot to come back to hear the rest. That was the first time. That month was also the first time we did not make love for an entire month. This didn’t strike me as something bad at first, because it was so different for me (for her I didn’t know) to make love when we had some time instead of doing it when we felt like it. Since I am not good at getting horny according to a schedule, this new sex habit was simply totally different and would not compare to the one we had shared before. We had shared our sex habits before, but now, in the dream, I felt like she had returned her own share back to me. Now it was my old sex habit versus the new sex style. I had to take it or leave it. So I took it. But every single time I made love to her, I did it to the girl she was before. I didn’t do this because I had something against her motherhood or the baby. In the dream I was happy with the baby. I loved the baby. I felt overwhelmingly responsible for it. It made me feel old, like I might not have enough to live to make sure this baby got all the way paid and paved to becoming a person, a someone. It made me feel my money would never be enough, my house never big enough, my patience never solid enough. I feared for the polluted air she would have to breathe, for the decreasing world reserve of clean water, for the proliferation of nuclear weapons in emerging countries. I would never tell her these things. They were welling up inside me every day and, soon enough, every night. But I was convinced she would not understand, she would think that these thoughts were freaky, devious, and not normal at best. So I kept silent. In the dream I knew that the question was not that she would not understand me, but rather that she could not afford to understand this. Not anymore. Not after the baby. This contradiction was painful for me (the me in the dream, not the me dreaming the dream). I could not surmount it. I could not forget it. The simple reason is that the contradiction was taking residence with us in our house. It was turning into a series of tangible things that we could see and touch and feel. These things were called in my mind the different-things, a new species of reality we could not face and from which we could not withdraw. With increasing pace, everything changed, from small things (taking a bath together) to bigger things (going on holiday and really having a holiday). Other small things (like going out, or watching a movie) were changing too, but these were not of concern to us because we were not doing them that often anyway. But the change in this case was that now we knew we would not be able to do these things. This, yes, was of concern. The string of these changes, made of tiny pearls, made of these different-things (that is to say the things that had been one way and were now different) was tight around my neck at one point (in the dream this was like a few years later but I could not say when exactly). Then again, I could not speak to her clearly about it. Not out of fear that she may not understand, but because in the dream I could not put these things in a straight line, and name them clearly, make a list, prove my point, claim I was seeing something real and important coming up between us; something dangerous for us. I wanted help from her. The other her, who was supposedly the real you. I needed help but I could not state my case clearly. I could not even offer a reason why I should state such case. So the help never came, and the us became I and she, and, on good days, I and she, and the baby. [Still reading? I am not adding anything! Actually I am sparing you a few details. At this point the dream got really scary. This is when I woke up in sweat and went to the kitchen for water. I felt like I was under hypnosis, and when I went back to bed, the whole thing resumed like the tape had just been paused.] When the dream became scary, the fear I had inside became sharper, it revealed itself as if a spotlight had been switched on its face. The fear came from the fact that I knew there was nothing I could do to change the change back to normal. We had come apart. The essence of us had melted into a matter I could not handle, would not want to, never had wanted to. For months the fear bordered on anger. Anger for the deprivation of the things I had wanted for me, and for us. I was dealing with the deepest part of my natural egoism. I was angered by the fact that this selfishness should surface now. It had been hidden away when we were happy. This could not be my fault. Gradually, I dominated this feeling, I changed angles, and I forced myself to understand things. But it didn’t help because what I understood was worse than the egoistic feelings I had managed to control. I understood that the wrong that was being done was not against me but against us. This, in the dream, felt intolerable, completely beyond my capacity of self-control because it was squarely against the very sense of my mission. Like a commando trained to stop thinking and perform a predetermined series of actions, I switched to a sort of justice-maker mode. I didn’t feel anger, I felt more like ... making justice by force. And in that there would inevitably be a part of revenge. By this time, we were more distant from one another than we both thought (or pretended). As beautiful as it had been, our life as a couple had not lasted enough to build sufficient memories, and the glue that keeps these together had not hardened well enough. Had we been sailing at sea on a wooden boat, the feeling was that the planks were coming apart, and not a spare nail was to be found onboard. Where to go? Which direction? Will there be repair tools on arrival? What if we sink here? What about the baby? Who will save the baby? This distance was increasing also because she took to spending summer holidays and sometimes winter holidays away from home. It was in another country, but in the dream it was not clear which country. It was far, it was expensive. At first, I looked at this generously, guessing that time with her extended family would give fullness to the experience of now being a mother, a central member of a family that she had wanted and created. Later on (three summers later or so) the feeling of deprivation I had endured every time she was away had become so excruciating that I thought it would destabilise me irreversibly. So I changed angles, since I could not change the reality. I looked at the good sides of her absences. There were none. I concentrated on the fact that even when she was at home with me, it was like being alone. We were rarely together; we could not speak for more than a bare minute before being interrupted. We had not discussed something, not once, since the trip back from the nursery. This thought helped make my time away from her (consequence of hers away from me) more bearable. Still, it was difficult at night. It was hard when I desired her warmth, her body, or simply a hug. It was literally a torture when I needed someone to be with. But in the end it all became bearable; one morning, in summer, just like that. That day was the day I turned into a married single. The term itself came to me in the dream while I was talking to myself naked on our balcony at home (where we had moved from the attic weeks before the baby was due), which I kept doing for a few summers like a sacred ritual intended to bring back the feelings of complicity, sensuality and night-time privacy that go so well with warm European summers. It was a self inflicted pain that became more intense with time and more pleasurable in a weird way that was secretly modifying my own notion of pleasure without my being really conscious of it. I was smoking endlessly, night after night after night, taking stuff to stay up longer and longer. It was such a relieving bad habit, one that I could well pay later on with my own life. It felt all the more good because for her I had quit smoking and drinking, took to the gym and to walking each day four kilometres to the office and four back to the attic. That had been when I wanted to live forever. Not that now I wanted to die, but forever was a term of no interest to me. As a married single I had full right to the bad sides of both conditions. My physical passion for her was the pillar of my unmoving faithfulness. I could not betray, cheat, kiss or love anybody else. I would not go to parties; I would leave dinners before the others to go home for the ritual of the smoky summer night on the balcony. As a married man, the sense of separation from the other two parts of the family combined viciously with the growing sense of guilt and responsibility. Was I a good father? Was I a good husband? Was I good at all? I have to work, I have to hang in here no matter what they’ll do to me because there is going to be bills to pay, universities, parties, cars, maybe abortions, separations, divorces. How would I know? I must walk this tunnel to its end, I cannot turn back, I can only walk with dignity or crawl without any. Then one summer a new feeling came to me from outside me, like a given. Injustice. Double injustice. The first one done to me, who had never wanted these additional responsibilities, who was honestly doing a great job of fulfilling the ones I had voluntarily embarked on, including forging the perfect nest for the two of us, having a job flexible enough to stay in bed longer if I wanted to, paid well enough to spend weekends away from home if we so pleased. The second one done to us. Of course by now, “us” was not us anymore. It was an entity that had existed and lived in another time and another space – the attic – and had been dishevelled and then dissolved, day after day, under constant attack until it could oppose no resistance, and then terminated mercilessly. This idea of injustice I did not like a bit from the very first time it arose in me. But I could not send it away and it began to grow like a plant in my brain. The absence of reward in our daily life acted as a potent fertiliser. By the time she left on her next two-month trip to her country, the plant was strong and tall and I could not eradicate it anymore. Not alone. Not without her help. This was not without consequences. If there had been injustice, there someone must be responsible of it. Someone guilty of perpetrating the acts that amounted to the injustice. I would pass the injustice made to me, but my life mission did not allow me to pass the injustice made to “us”. It didn’t take me long to conclude the investigation and the findings sent my whole world crumbling into pieces. I was living with the murderer of “us”. I was sleeping with her. I had even provided the support and logistics for the crime. In my dream this discovery was not a huge shock. What was, though, were the consequences of it. Now what? Everything got stuck, fixed, impossible to move forth or back. Dead end. I think she must have realised this. She knew that something my mind had come to was somehow irreversible, and bad. Bad for us all. The part in her that had been part of “us” was still a perfect match to me, and this part made her feel my feelings. Maybe she could simply see me better now that we were not so close. Sometimes she looked like someone who cannot swim about to fall overboard. I felt love surges and regret waves invading me all the time; I could not sleep for weeks at a time. I would try to get closer, I would draw myself to her body, but most times her body was a living testimony of the injustice. The perfection of it that I could not forget, each detail that I had loved limitlessly, all this was now a thorn of regret trusted into me too deep to be extirpated without collateral damage. But I loved her. So my brain did something I didn’t expect. It stopped linear thinking, archived the theory of the injustice, and undertook a total re-examination of all data available. I felt sick all the time, I could not eat, could not do anything else since the moment my brain turned into a computer running a massively complex equation, trying desperately to find the values satisfying it. The equation was the last stage. The energy it took to run it was more than what I had in me. It all started to fry and buzz. I was not going to get this one done, and I could not stop it by pulling an imaginary plug. This was it. It had to be it. Paradoxically, this was also the time when we had some good moments together. Like someone rushed to an accident scene realising she got there too late, she showed pity for me and felt anguished. She got closer in ways she had not used to in years (like giving me a long massage, or watch me sleep, or trying to, most of the time). But even this came at a price that was beyond my means because the realisation of my need of “us” made her feel that the family she had hard-headedly wanted was now less desirable, perhaps a mistake, an error in the system that cannot be undone because the system itself is based on it as a parameter. I was scared that she may break down. I did not want any harm to come to her, the her whom I knew lived inside the present her, beneath the stretch marks, somewhere underneath something else, where I could no longer reach. I had a constant fear of everything, all the time. That she would start drinking, that she could mistreat the child; that she would lose interest and determination in this humongous job of being a parent which no heavenly force can possibly condone. I knew I had to encourage her, but I was by then too weak to do that. Meanwhile the equation was gathering speed in my brain. I became it. I was the equation. No results ever came out of the calculation that was sucking the life out of me. The only firm data in the equation were that in fact an error had been made, injustice had resulted from it, and nothing of this was repairable. Years had gone by damaging a portion of my (our) existence that could not be recovered. The possibility of an “after” was not realistic given our age. You cannot go back, you cannot have another go. The responsible, I thought, was the person I had striven all my life to find, and had found; the person who had let me love her but then prevented me from carrying our my life mission. The situation, as it appeared before me, admitted strictly no way out. Or at least none without damage being inflicted on others. I try as hard as I can to never harm others. I am generous thus vulnerable to being exploited; but this is just another way to protect others from me. If I am the one exploited I am not in a good position to exploit others. The dream stopped here. Well, it didn’t really. I was still dreaming it but it all went black like the projector had been masked. No audio, no image. Even as I was sleeping I was conscious that the real me wanted to know the rest. There must be a rest. There wasn’t. At one point some noises emerged, faint at first, all entangled. There were voices but none that I could recognise. Not hers, not the child’s. I couldn’t make out the words. I could not speak either. There was all this water, in my ears first, then in my throat, and in my nose. I was not concerned by the water, but I was in a panic all the same, a real one, thick and engulfing. More than the water (it occurred to me I could not make out if it was salt water, freshwater, or if it had any taste at all) it was this panic that was pervading me. Not fear, beyond that. I was past the invisible border between fear and the knowledge that what was happening now was finally beyond my control, something big and unrecoverable, and at the same time easy, almost natural. It made me think that I was sliding. Down, sideways, or horizontally I wouldn’t know, but the feeling was one of sliding away, while inside me other things made of feelings, memories and regrets were sliding too. It felt good for a short moment to think that finally there had been a response to the injustice. That something was happening. But then the panic overwhelmed all the rest and I saw it was coming from inside me not from around me. It was the distance between us, that now I could no longer control. I was going somewhere further away from the tiny part of “us” that was left in her, and I wasn’t ready. [And that’s the whole story. I don’t know where it came out from but I can tell you I now fear that the dream will come to me again. If you had been with me I think we would have laughed, or maybe I wouldn’t even have had the dream. Oh well, now it’s on paper, so we can keep it and joke about it one day! – I miss you.] PS: Just got your e-mail, noted the flight details, yes no problem, even if it’s early in the morning I will be at the airport of course. What is the surprise? Why can’t you tell me now? At least give me a hint....! OK, I will wait another two weeks for the revelation! I will have the perfect breakfast ready for the two of us for when we get home. I hope it’ll be sunny.* Francesco Pisano, UNOSAT *Special thanks to Alyson Lofthouse who edited this text Crossing lines It couldn’t be ! But it was ! Maurice, as large as life. And in the case of that wine merchant from his high-perched, hard-drinking, church-ridden village in Canton Valais, ‘large’ was no vain word. No amount of therapy had got the better of his kilos. I had once warned that I would no longer take his ‘breakthroughs’ seriously before he lost a good ten of them. “I don’t care, he had retorted, since I take them seriously!” A good sign of progress, I reckoned. Nor by the looks of things had he shed a single pound of flesh since I saw him last, some ten years back. Which was odd, considering… With him across the road stood a stately lady, a hint of a smile imprinted on her face. He spotted me and beamed his recognition, waving his fists above his head. Then guiding his companion towards the pedestrian crossing, he stepped in my direction. Memories flooded back of those crazy, soul-searching ‘Personal Development’ workshops that had seen a sulking, gluttonous vintner discover and display a long-buried, creative, fun-loving inner child. And the woman? Not his wife. I had met his wife. Or should I say widow? For Maurice had died a good five years before. He came to a stop right in front of me. We both refrained from physical contact. “Great to see you, Maurice! What does it feel like to be dead?” The question had blurted itself out. Stupid? Intrusive? By way of reply, he emitted one of his high-pitched, inhibited giggles I knew so well from his one-man sketches. He would keep us in fits on those theatrical improvisation evenings, especially when he lapsed into his tangy patois. (An offshoot of Franco-Provençal, I’d been told.) He eyed me in silence. “Tell me, are you really here? I mean…materially? He waddled over to a bench, seated himself, then bounced up and down as if to assert the solidity of the bum-to-wood contact. “And immaterially ─ like walking through walls and that kind of thing?” He heaved himself up to lean his back against a wall. Half of his corpulence absorbed itself into the brickwork, then stopped. He shrugged as if to say “That’s as far as I can manage at the present stage.” He returned to the bench. I joined him. Again our gazes locked. His eyes were still that aquamarine, but glistening now with the magic of fathomless lakes. And here was I, his one-time mentor, his psycho-guide, his Mr. Know-all, wanting nothing more than to pester him with questions ─ basic, baby questions, like “Mummy, where do I come from?” In flashes I reviewed the topics we would work on, bestrewed with terms like ‘survival issues’, ‘catastrophic expectations’ or ‘unfinished business’. So what on earth (oops, wrong word!) was on the agenda once survival was done with, when the ultimate catastrophe (if that’s what it was) had been lived through, and with no business left to finish? But gosh, his lady-friend! Gone completely out of my mind! Shouldn’t she out of mere decency be drawn into our talk ─ for what it was? I looked around. She was nowhere more to be seen. Maurice’s eyes had not strayed from my person, my exposed, uncertain person. Dead-live eyes dispensing a vision of the void, recasting me into Mr. Know-nothing. I felt my features loosening, the mask dispossessed of its bearings. Had I truly helped to widen his horizons? Were his present horizons wider than any I could begin to imagine? What was he thinking of me? What was he thinking? Was he thinking?
Before I could quench it, another unrehearsed question crossed my lips. “Is there anything, Maurice, in your Beyond that kind of corresponds to sex?” In the old days, the slightest allusion to the subject would elicit a mischievous glint. Yes, the familiar twinkle was still there, but light-years removed, like stars reflected in a placid pool. He rose to his feet, beckoning me to follow suit. For the first time, a touch. He took my hand into both of his. I’d expected them to be cold, but they weren’t. Nor were they warm. They were… how to put it? There yet not there. Then he spread out his arms invitingly. I sank into them. A lot of affectionate hugging had gone on back then. That more than anything, no doubt, had, once accepted, whittled away his puritanical stiffness. With Maurice those hugs had always felt awkward, attempting to encompass as much as I could of his girth. But now it was easy, natural. In the melding of our forms, there was no more telling where one of us ended and the other began, who was Mr. Fatty and who Mr. Slim. My eyes closed of their own accord. Was I dreaming of Maurice, or was he calling me up in one of his dreams? Had he been playing at being dead, or me at being alive? Time slipped by, but somewhere else. When my eyes opened, by some inexplicable turnaround, he was standing with his back to me. Staring ahead, he eased himself from our embrace and glided towards the kerb, veering left to the zebra crossing. (He had always been a stickler for sticking to the rules.) He stepped from the sidewalk to head for the opposite side. And with each slow, successive step, his frame grew hazier, vaguer… And by the time I saw him on the opposite shore, Maurice was nowhere more to be seen. David Walters, UNOG, retired 
David Walters at the Ex Tempore evening 2008 Photo: A. de Zayas Poèmes Poems Poemas
И в суете столичных дней С тобою забываем мы о ней. И мы природной красотой Пренебрегаем ведь порой. Вот на столе – букет цветов, Он сорван, как бы, вместо слов. Слова любви не говори – Ты на букетик лишь взгляни. Взглянув на них всего лишь раз, Той красоты не видит глаз – Ты сядь, побольше посмотри, Дотронься, аромат цветов вдохни. И в детства мир ты попадаешь вдруг, Где все прекрасным сталося вокруг. Когда совсем ты юным был И красоту цветов ценил. И это милое мгновенье, Что аромат цветов навёл, Вдруг изменилось настроение, Вдруг мир в глазах твоих расцвёл. Цветы любви, цветы надежд – Цветы в природе, их не счесть. Но в суете столичных дней С тобою забываем мы о ней – О красоте наивных слов, О красоте прекрасных снов, О красоте «простых» цветов. Nadejda Khamrakulova, UNECE Directory: Extempore Extempore -> Commission socio-culturelle du personnel des Nations Unies Society of Writers Download 0.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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